Worldbuilding Mistakes: How to Avoid Inconsistency

so sir Joff is riding through this pretty little peasant Village and as he goes a spring Breeze lifts one of the curtains out of the window and Spooks his horse I'm sorry what could you just pause there for one moment and let's talk about the fact that a curtain has just blown out of a window in a medieval peasant fantasy setting do you understand that if you don't automate spinning it costs the equivalent of two weeks wages for a single tunic made from two yards count them one two yards of cloth and that is what I want to talk about today mistakes in World building that make my teeth itch and make me want to win welcome to another episode of just in time worlds with your host Marie meany if you like Fantasy World building videos and you want to encourage me to make more or maybe you just want to rip apart my world building you can pick up copies of my Epic fantasy series sang wheel Chronicles links to all of them are down below I have received some compliments on the World building and some good reviews which is great given that I run this Channel and you know I'm taking a risk by putting them up there with this video okay enough of that let's plunge into Fantasy World building and the things that really shouldn't be done so I do just want to say right off the bat that this will probably be a series because I started out with 10 things that annoyed me and then I went on a little bit of a rant on the first three and I realized that I'm not going to fit in 10 in a video so this is the first of the things that make my teeth itch inconsistent technology or magic imagine you've got a world with a dazzling spectacle of Starships zipping through the cosmos at warp speed making the Castle Run in less than 12 paric if you will and you're chasing some Rebel scum for information and an escape pod fires off from the ship and you say nah let them go there are no life signs on board my dude what did you forget droids exist and why wouldn't you wreck the apart it's not like you're going to run out of laser bolts but this kind of stupidity and inconsistency isn't just in space fairing Societies or technology no no no no it's Rife in the Realms of the Arcane too in Harry Potter owls carry post right right except that Wizards can teleport kids I'm telling you it's freaking an animal abuse to make one of Nature's slowest flying birds carry post when you have wizards who can teleport if you're going to use a bird to pick up post at least choose a fast one this mistake is commonly made when the World Builder doesn't think through the implications of their Fantastical elements or when they just being lazy with their plot like in Star Wars the secret to avoiding this kind of hole is don't be lazy firstly it's particularly infuriating in Star wars's case because it could have been avoided so easily by giving the Pod Shields and having r2d to just strengthen the shields by killing the life support which the droids don't need then the cruiser could have shot at the and the shields could have held and no plot hole so when you're building out your world and your plot please for the love of baby chickens if a 5-year-old can see through your plot come up with another device the second example the one of Harry Potter is I think a case of the rule of cool getting the better of the author I'm not saying it's not cool to have our carry post it's cute but it isn't that cool and it is incredibly weird to do that when you have wizards who can teleport why would they not have post houses where they move letters from one place to another in their Villages and then if you really want owls the owls can pick it up from these little post officers and just take it like the last mile to the house if that's what you want it is still weird to use an owl they are slow and many of them struggle to fly during the day but okay okay owls mind you there is a lot about the potterverse that is weird and this one the owl one is a pretty benign little hole anyway the way to avoid falling into this kind of hole is just to engage in a bit of practical thinking apply your own inventions within the world consistently if you've got teleporting Wizards use them it's fine to have quirky elements like alost for the sake of charm but maybe limit their uses to situations where magic can't easily reach or is prohibited say perhaps to deliver a message under the nose of The Wizarding authorities or in cases where teleportation is too risky or impractical like if ourpost only took post to Hogwarts where you famously can't operate or disapparate 100% no problem with that at all but owl Stak posts everywhere make it make sense sorry anyway don't do that don't just throw a cool thing like people can teleport out the window for the sake of introducing alost seriously and speaking of convenience let's talk about d x makina the bane of Storytelling the ancient Greek form literally means god from the machine and it's when a seemingly unsolvable problem is abruptly solved by an unexpected and somewhat lazy introduction of a new character ability or object it's like saying oh we're trapped no no no worries I just remembered I have a get out of jail free card in my back pocket Terry good kind is really guilty of this the whole sword of truth series is dependent on one single Trope Richard summons deis X makina to overcome the final Conflict of every single book if your character needs to break the magical rules of your world in every single book to overcome the central conflict of the book you have a de is X marking out problem and you're going to need an intervention to put a stop to it this is your intervention remember when you're building your world every cool idea needs a how why does it exist in the context of the world and how does it fit into the broader system every new thing that you put into your magic system or your technology or your discoveries needs to be something that the characters have touched at least twice they've planted the seed they've tended the seed and it sprouts to become a beautiful new plot device rather than an ugly de X Machina that just dropped out of the sky without doing that you're just throwing glitter at the pages and calling it magic if you've liked that little rant go ahead and hit the Thumbs Up Button by the power of my asking you to and let's take a stroll down economics Lane all right imagine you're watching a sci-fi film and there's this planet and all they do all they do is produce apples that's right apples no textiles no Metals no entertainment just apples the planet's economy is so Apple Centric I half expected to find snow white in their leadership that's what we call a monoculture economy but how does that planet get I don't know clothes do they trade apples for everything even space ships it's like making a planet out of New York City and only producing Bagels sure bagels are delicious I like Bagels but what happens when you want coffee or cream cheese to go with them this kind of World building reminds me of Divergent every person in Divergent is Pigeon H hold into this one of these five factions each faction is all about one particular virtue but seriously where do they get their clothes who makes their weapons what about the furniture the beds they sleep on surely not everyone can be brave and honest and farming and whatever the whole time somebody has to be making the shoes it's as if the basic needs of Life are just too mundane for the grand division of the story and these factions they're not allowed to trade either so I I don't even I don't get it and speaking of not trading that whole we don't need trade notion makes my my teeth hurt in so many stories there's these no trade planets or single trade planets or this region that doesn't trade with anybody else or whatever and trade agreements economics all these things that drove Innovation that drove cultures exchanging information that drove so much of our own history all of that nah now we don't need that who needs trade I mean the fact that we don't have spices to put in our food the fact that we don't maybe have the right kind of animals maybe we don't have the right kind of you know materials to make clothes with none of that's important we don't need trade the reality is trade is the lifeblood of civilizations ideas don't breed in a vacuum they need friends trade is where cultures clash and merge without it you're not just missing out on economic opportunities you're missing out on drama on Intrigue and on those delicious trade root scandals often these same worlds with their monoculture regions and their no trade areas completely lack the concept of resource scarcity which is why they don't need Trad because they're so self-sufficient now like I said in the intro did you ever consider how much effort goes into making a single piece of clothing before automation I speak about about this quite extensively in my video on spinning which you can check out in the information card but the tldr is before the spinning wheel most people had to be content with two outfits a year at most and they wore their clothes till it fell off their backs it was only with the invention of the automated Spinning Wheel in the 1830s that cloth became really cheap and this means for those of you paying attention ain't no peasant house going to have curtains people nor are they going to have glass they're going to have shutters over the holes in the wall that are their windows and then there's salt salt was incredibly hard to come by before automation why because salt mines are hella dangerous people die from dehydration inside them before the Industrial Revolution salt was mined by slaves or prisoners because it unived more workers than you want to think about and books oh my goodness books books had to be copied by hand before the printing press by hand each was handwritten often on parchment which required just about an actual flock of sheep to make the freaking parchment with and they were illuminated like pictures were drawn in them this was a major industry of Summer cond and is still where books are illuminated today summer cond on the uh spice root and in some people's worlds in some people's fantasy worlds books are treated like their pamphlet flyers and I'm just like oh I'm I'm a hit my head against this desk if you don't start treating people's time with a little bit more respect before automation all the stuff was done by hand and it took time everything took time and time is expensive so how do you avoid all this stuff sit in your house and touch everything you use in a week physically touch it and think what its equivalent is in your world and how people would get it consider this glass bottle this wouldn't be in my world because glass is expensive so what would they have instead because they still need a bottle to put water in a water flask that's a lot cheaper something made out of wood something made out of leather something like that would be much more acceptable to them so think about the items in your house then think about what isn't made in your in your immediate region if you're in America think what's not made in your state if you're in Europe think what's not made in your country if you're anywhere else think in terms of your region or your country what is not made here what does your country have to trade for what comes in on the great ships and then grab the map of your fantasy world decide decide where these resources come from whether they come from the main region where you're writing the story or elsewhere and then put down trade cities cities that exist where these resources are traded and that gives you great economic diversity it gives you trade and it gives you routs along which trades can happen and right there you've not just solved the problem that would make my teeth itch if I read your book but you also have actually will built some great cities and places of interest on your map okay up next we're going to tackle ecology and the all too common continent of plot convenience but first do me a solid if you've been nodding along to my economic ranting please do give that like button a gentle tap and off we go into Point number three what we're talking about here is the wildly under thought of world of fantasy and sci-fi ecology let's start with single biome worlds you know the one the planet that's all desert all tundra or heaven forbid entirely rainforest no change in the climate or ecosystem across the entire Globe it's like The Weather Channel got stuck on one setting and and everyone just went yep that's the right one now you might be thinking but Marie what about that to we and sure yeah Star Wars got away with it but that doesn't mean it's not ecologically bizar the thing is single biome planets are common they're also normally dead Venus Mercury Mars these are all single biome planets do you you see life on them and that's the real problem most planets capable of sustaining Life as we know it is also going to have biodiversity nature thrives on biodiversity it's a messy complex and beautifully interconnected web variety isn't just the life of the party it's essential for the survival of the the party guests also known as every living thing so sure you can have single biome worlds if dead is the biome but honestly single biome worlds aren't as bad as not thinking about what happens to the environment when you introduce the Fantastical imagine drop dropping a polar bear into the Sahara it's not going to become the king of the desert it's going to have a really bad time and yet so many stories bring in creatures willy-nilly like oh let's have dragons here because dragons are cool there's no thought about what do dragons eat other than the occasional unwary night or how they'll impact the local Wildlife Heck if you want a real life example of even innocent animals as effect some ass let a rabbit loose in Australia or a pair of rabbits rather and now they threaten the local Wildlife by overg grazing on a continent that absolutely was not ready for rabbits or take the lion fish in Florida the lion fish hitched a ride on a ship got off in the Florida Keys where it had no predators and it's pretty much cleaning the reef down there it's eating everything inside so if you're in Florida do your bit and eat some lion fish they eat enough of everything else that you are perfectly just ified my point is fantasy creatures need a food chain what do they eat what eats them what breaks them down when they die all of that kind of thing and I talk about that in my video on how to create really weird life but now both of these problems the ecosphere problem the single biome problem they're half points yeah they annoy me a bit but they don't really drive me nuts what drives me nuts is when people don't think about the impact of evolution and these creatures that they create if you have a creature in your world which breathes fire when did that enter the gene pool how many other fire breathers are there in your world are there fire resistant creatures that have developed trays against it if not one why not how did this happen I can accept it if somehow it's magic or whatever like something introduced it but give me a reason because if you're telling me that this is a natural creature this Fantastical thing that you've introduced is a natural creature I want to be able to see that there are other creatures like it in your world some way that I can make sense in my head of how this evolutionary activity came to be and that's just for creatures now let's talk about Evolution and Magic if EV if your Evolution if your magic system is genetic how is it that not everyone in your world has magic let me give you an example of what I'm talking about in terms of evolution your glutose Maximus your ass is the most amazing thing you're sitting on today and I am not joking the human glutose Maximus is an incredible muscle that enables us to walk upright other primates do have this muscle but it's flatter and way less strong now after five billion years of evolution we humans can all walk upright because of that muscle we're not all equally good at it I for example take 30 minutes to run 3.5 km because I'm not very fit I do run because I know that I should and I need to try and do something about keeping fit and so on but I'm not great at running but I can do it on the other hand Hussein bolt Sprints through 100 m so fast he can outrun a road Ro Runner which is more than you can say for the coote from my childhood memories of that particular cartoon so with your genetic magic system what is the ass what is the thing that all humans have because of this magic system they might not all be equally good at it they some of them might barely be able to you know light a little fire with it some of them can call down nuclear strikes that's fine 100% but they all have an ass now this is not to say that you can't make a genetic magic system work I mean I did and I have a reason why not everyone in my world has it in the world of sangel Chronicles my Epic Fantasy series now in my new released third book of the series I start exploring why it is that not everyone has it and that becomes a coarse theme of the story but I knew about that when I took the decision to go with a genetic magic system so all that you need in your world is a reason why genetically it is not so common as one would assume such a thing would be maybe Mages are literally selectively bred you know maybe they actually keep Mages in cages and kind of force breed them together and anybody not Mages doesn't go through that and that's why they're not Mages or maybe there's some kind of weird magical cap that says only so many people can be born of with magic or you could have some form of magical birth control so Mages can't breathe or maybe people die from using magic early so it's not that common although be careful with that one cuz then why didn't may just you know blow themselves up completely and why isn't completely left the Gen pool and a lot of complications with that one but you can use that just think of some reason that you can give to the reader that you can show the reader so that they understand why it is that not everyone in your world has an ass or give everyone in your Wilden ass just make some people's asses be Hussein bolt powering 100 m and some people jogging 30 minutes on a 3 km run and that is a wrap on the three things that annoy me today and the things that make my teeth itch what do you think of them did I miss any do I should I not be annoyed by some is the single buy home thing actually perfectly valid let me know in the comments what you think and the next one of these we will delve into the perilous Realms of culture politics religions and the mistakes people make if you can't bear to wait for that video consider joining my channel as a member you do get early access to my videos for the price of €7 or around $8 a month however if you do plan to wait for that video in the meantime why not check out another video from my channel right above my head is creating a forest by home which will help you understand how to make forests in your world or you could watch a random one over here it really does help the algorithm if you actually watch two videos in a row it tells YouTube that you know my channel is adding value so please if you could do me a solid clicky

Channel: Just In Time Worlds

Views: 1,934

Keywords: fantasy, fantasy world building, world building, fantasy worldbuilding, how to write fantasy, mythology, worldbuilding for fantasy, how to build a world, how to make a fantasy world, how to make a good fantasy world, building your own world, how to build a fictional world, how to create a believable fantasy world, world building mistakes, how to fix world building mistakes

Id: Irgbg5H7Fdo

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023